A blog about agile, lean, people and things
If you regularly read my blog, then you will know that communities of practice are my specialist subject and core to a lot of the work that I do. I help lots of organisations who are building their specialist skills in digital and agile delivery and those communities form an essential foundation for just that. …
In a recent talk that I gave at Agile testing days and Lean Agile Scotland called “Whole Team Responsibility”, I mentioned the team manual as a way of growing empathy in teams. Here is a quick write up with a little more detail and how to use it.
I have a habit of bringing people and communities together, this means I can’t seem to help myself setting up or getting involved in running meetups (my current count is at six*). Faced with not enough time to devote to my existing meetup, I naturally decided to start a new one. This time a remote …
Many people use the term “Agile ceremonies” as a collective term for activities like standups, retrospectives, reviews and planning. I’ve always felt uncomfortable with the word “ceremony” in this context. It’s never sat well with me and I don’t like using it with people who are new to agile ways of working. I’ve been thinking …
Many organisations work with dispersed teams or stakeholders, so there must be an easy way to do an engaging remote show and tell, surely… right? I couldn’t find one, this post is the result of my research to find my own and a guide for others.
That might sound like a bit of an odd title on my blog but bear with me. I have spent the last year making some changes in myself and I’ve used everything I know about how people work, approaches to change and experimentation in order to do that. This post talks about how I went …
I first wrote about skills mapping in my book Building successful communities of practice. This post digs a little deeper into identifying skills and capabilities with communities of practice. Skills and capability maps help organisations identify gaps and where to invest in skills development. So it makes sense that many want to create them. At a …
I’m a big believer that language and the words you use say a lot about a culture, and that we can take steps to change culture through changing those words. Words can make people feel excluded, unappreciated and overlooked. I try to make conscious decisions about the words that I use and will phase out …
I recently put a workshop together to take a new team through to help describe some important agile concepts including the benefits of working collaboratively and swarming on tasks; the value of communication; how to self-organise; how limiting work in progress achieves more value and what we mean by T-shaped teams. The workshop itself was a …
This is a quick blog post with some tips for effective stand-ups that a friend asked me to write so he could share it with someone else. So here it is Mark. These 4Ps came to life when I was working with Amy Wagner creating and delivering some training in Brussels. The training was intended to …
About a month ago I put together a list of needs for conference speakers. I’d been thinking about it because I’ve been speaking at a fair few conferences recently and seen various approaches by different organisers. I’ve also seen important information missed that I and other speakers could have benefitted from up front. I know how …
I do a fair bit of training with organisations who want to become more agile. The conversation often starts with “can you give agile training to our staff?”. This is a starting point for a conversation but needs a bit more digging before I can understand what the real need is and what outcome we should …
I have recently taken up knitting (as anyone that follows me on Instagram will know) and as well as helping me build an increasing collection of brightly coloured hats, it’s helped remind me about the process of learning and how this relates to people learning agile. Which is always a good reminder as an agile …
At a recent Agile on the bench meetup, Matthew Butt gave a great talk called Hacking Authority in which he explored different types of authority that exist within organisations. It is a really interesting lens that can be used to view influencers in an organisation and I’ll be using it for a workshop very soon to create …
If you read my blog, then you’ll know that I have an interest in diversity and I also run a meetup called Agile on the Bench. At the Feb meetup I joined forces with Lakshan Saldin to give a 10 min talk about how diversity, groupthink and echo chambers affect our teams. Here is what we said….
I’ve been using Trello for a few years, both for personal projects and with teams. I love how simple it is to use, which makes it easy to use in the way that works for you. The downside of this is that some teams struggle with knowing where to start, this post is about showing …
The realtime retrospective is a way of capturing feedback or information to help improvements in realtime. I recently tried it out at Agile in the City Bristol with some great results.
I co-host the meetup Agile on the Bench with Cara Bermingham. We have been collecting stats of perceived gender diversity (counted rather than surveyed) since it started it in Nov 2014. This post is sharing those stats and some observations. When I set it up (originally with David Lowe) we set a rule about speakers, …
I have just published a blog post on Infoq, take a look over here: infoq.com/articles/communities-of-practice-agile-organisation
I was recently invited to talk at the Turing Festival on the Product / People day. Here is that talk that I gave: Firstly it’s worth me explaining why the title Embracing Change or Bracing for Change. I often give Agile training for people and teams new to Agile, one thing that I tend to cover …
After my talk and post in May, I have now turned the Agile Team Onion into a free ebook. The Agile Team Onion model is a way of helping collaboration between Agile teams and the rest of your organisation, to lead to successful delivery. It’s a short book (around 3000 words) and it delves a …
I’ve been running a friendly, low-tech, lunchtime Agile meet up in a park since Nov 2014, if you want to know more about it, have a look over here. One of the things that we’ve done since the start is to give our lovely attendees badges. And not the same badge, it’s a different design every …
I realise that I haven’t blogged about one of my latest projects, the diversity charter (although I’ve tweeted about it quite a bit). This came about after this blog post about considerations for event organisers and frustrations at seeing the same people at conferences. I created it to make people think about how the impact that they …
I’ve recently been playing with ways of explaining the extended Agile team for large and largeish organisations. I get frustration when I see Agile teams that are essentially siloed off from the wider business (for many reasons). This causes dependency and communication issues and means they just aren’t able to deliver anything very quickly. I don’t …
I have been thinking about barriers to diversity at conferences a lot recently. This is sparked by a few things, including my own recent conference submissions, an experiment that I carried out recently that let people encourage their friends to speak and conversations on the topic. Here is the round up of some of that …